Published for Washington Post Blog by Garance Franke-Ruta, June 2, 2010:

America’s 43rd president has joined Facebook.

Former president George W. Bush’s Facebook page was set up around two weeks ago but made public Wednesday, rapidly climbing to more than 27,000 who “Liked” it by mid-afternoon.

The first Facebook post was written in the third person, suggesting the page is being maintained by someone other than the president, as is common with Facebook pages for public figures:

“Since leaving office, President Bush has remained active. He has visited 20 states and 8 countries; given over 65 speeches; launched the George W. Bush Presidential Center; participated in 4 policy conferences through The Bush Institute; finished the first draft of his memoir, “Decision Points”; and partnered with President Clinton to establish the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. More on his activities in future posts…”

A spokesman for the former president confirmed to CBS that the site is real.

Bush has kept a relatively low public profile since leaving the White House, and his move into social media space is sure to be watched closely as he carves out an online identity.

A fresh Twitter identity for the former president was also launched Wednesday, though it has not yet been verified by the company, its procedure for confirming the identity of public figures on the service. “Stay tuned for updates!” @George_WBush wrote Wednesday afternoon in an inaugural post. ABC News reported that it is being maintained by the George W. Bush Presidential Center, but not Bush personally.

Many political figures on Twitter have their feeds maintained by staff. President Obama is on Twitter but uses the site sparingly and mainly for formal announcements and speech excerpts. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominees for the White House, can be very personal in their use of Twitter and Facebook, however, and use the services as outlets for pointed political commentary and event notifications for supporters.

There are a large number of fake George W. Bushes on Twitter; the new @George_WBush address is designed for those who “Support George Bush.”

An e-mail to Bush’s spokesman was not immediately returned.

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(AP) – 7 hours ago

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Former President George W. Bush says if he had it to do over, he would still waterboard the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique that the Obama administration considers torture. Bush acknowledged Wednesday that the U.S. used the harsh interrogation technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and said he would “do it again to save lives.”

Bush made the comment while speaking to the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is the most senior al-Qaida operative in U.S. custody.

In his speech, Bush defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. He said ousting Saddam Hussein “was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him.”

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FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH’S MEMOIR, DECISION POINTS, TO BE PUBLISHED BY CROWN ON NOVEMBER 9, 2010 — Publisher Unveils Book Jacket —

New York, NY (April 26, 2010) — Decision Points, by George W. Bush, will be published on November 9, 2010, by Crown Publishers. This groundbreaking new brand of memoir will be centered on the fourteen most critical and historic decisions in the life and public service of the 43rd President of the United States.

The book will be released simultaneously in the U.S. and Canada in hardcover, e-book, and audio formats. The announcement was made today by Tina Constable, Vice President, Publisher, Crown Publishers, who also unveiled the book jacket, which is available at www.randomhouse.com/crown.

Since leaving the Oval Office, President Bush has given virtually no interviews or public speeches about his presidency. Instead, he has spent almost every day writing Decision Points, a strikingly personal and candid account revealing how and why he made the defining decisions in his consequential presidency and personal life.

In gripping, never-before-heard detail, President Bush brings readers inside the Texas Governor’s Mansion on the night of the hotly contested 2000 election; aboard Air Force One on 9/11 in the gripping hours after America’s most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; inside the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq; and behind the Oval Office desk for his historic and controversial decisions on the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, Afghanistan, Iran, and other issues that have shaped the first decade of the 21st century.

The former President offers intimate, unprecedented details about his decision to quit drinking, his discovery of faith, and his relationships with his family. He writes honestly and directly about his flaws and mistakes, as well as his historic achievements in reforming education, providing life-saving treatments for HIV/AIDS and malaria for millions of people in Africa, safeguarding the country from another terrorist attack, and other areas.

Decision Points will carry a suggested retail price of $35. A cloth-bound, signed, and numbered limited edition of 1,000 copies, priced at $350, is also planned.

At publication, the former President will embark on a national book tour, details of which will be announced in the coming months.

Crown Publishers is an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG.

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As published for the blog tech President on April 9th, 2010:

by Nancy Scola

Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are two peas in a cyber-dissident pod, it seems:

The Conference on Cyber Dissidents: Global Successes and Challenges is the inaugural event of the The George W. Bush Institute’s Area of Focus on Human Freedom, and includes the Institute’s first two Visiting Fellows in Human Freedom: Oscar Morales, from Colombia, and Mohsen Sazegara, from Iran. The Conference deals with political movements in repressive societies seeking to promote greater freedom of speech, religion, political and economic participation. The event will bring to Dallas a number of active dissidents from China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela, all of whom make significant use of the Internet and other digital media tools in their advocacy for greater freedom in their countries. These dissidents from around the world will be joined by scholars, democracy advocates and current and former officials of the U.S. Department of State in a discussion of trends in cyber-dissent, both on their own and within the broader context of dissident activity and the movement for freedom around the world.

Some of the names here, and in the list of other participants, are familiar. No Mas FARC’s Morales, for example, is in addition to being a George W. Bush Institute fellow, is an active participant in theAlliance of Youth Movements supported that has worked closely with Hillary Clinton’s State Department. It’s a measure of how quickly “21st century statecraft” has become a central strain of thinking in foreign policy without, frankly, all that much in the way of deep critique in the merits and challenges of the approach. (Thanks, Ari Melber)

While “George W. Bush” might not be the first person that pops into your head when you think about cyber dissidence, there’s some sense to it. For one thing, you can see this approach mesh well with the sort of hand-on democracy promotion he leaned towards at times during his terms. More directly and perhaps more importantly, the executive director of the GWB Institute is James Glassman, who was aggressive on the public diplomacy front at State during the Bush years. Heck, it sounds like a fascinating conference. Let’s hope there’s a webcast.

Oh, also, for what it’s worth, it turns out that GeorgeBushInstitute.com runs on WordPress.

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Haiti has not been forgotten. On Monday, former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush visited Haiti to reassure the people of the earthquake-shattered country that they have not been forgotten more than two months after the Jan. 12 quake. The two were there as heads of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, set up to help Haiti recover from the disaster that killed more than 200,000 people.

To contribute, text “QUAKE” to 20222, and a $10 donation to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund will be added to your cell-phone bill.

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As published for the Chicago Tribune on March 15th, 2010:

Imagine the delight of a retired president, roosting in Dallas where a presidential library and think tank are being erected in his name and reading the morning headline about Americans missing him.

That billboard in Minnesota picturing a smiling George W. Bush with the question “Miss me yet?” isn’t the only sign of No. 43 nostalgia these days. T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs and other Bush paraphernalia are popping up online.

It seems that things have gotten brighter for Bush since leaving office on Jan. 20, 2009, with an approval rating of 22 percent. His favorability rating last month stood at 38 percent in a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics survey. Among Texas Republicans, his favorability has risen to 79 percent, according to Public Policy Polling. Perhaps he should have run for governor again.

“There are those who may have disagreed with President Bush on a few issues,” Tarrant County, Texas, Republican Party Chairwoman Stephanie Klick tells the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in a story that may have landed on Bush’s doorstep. “Now that we have President (Barack) Obama, many would prefer President Bush to be in office again.”

The former president and his wife Laura have retired to Preston Hollow in Dallas, where he jogs, works on his memoirs and prepares for his library and public policy institute at Southern Methodist University, the former first lady’s alma mater.

Last week, the Star-Telegram notes, 13 of the top 100 items sold by CafePress.com featured the “Miss me yet?” Bush design. An average of 500 such items are sold daily and the site now has more than 7,700 “Miss me yet?” designs, according to company spokesman Marc Cowlin.

“It’s still going strong,” he said. “This seems to be a larger trend that will continue.”

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Original post here

As published for France’s Le Figaro on March 8, 2010:

By Ivan Rioufol and translated by Mary Kinney

Will history finally give its due to George W. Bush? Launched seven years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is indeed his policy of democratizing Iraq  that is asserting itself – election after election and despite serious initial strategic errors. Last weekend, Iraqis mobilized en masse to go vote, despite intimidation by al-Qaeda (38 dead in the attacks). The Sunni minority, which had hitherto abstained, took to the ballot boxes. According to initial projections, the Islamist parties have confirmed their decline. As Le Figaro’s special correspondent in Baghdad Adrien Jaulmes wrote on Monday: “The American invasion and installation of a new regime have propelled the country into a democratic system unparalleled in the Arab world, excluding the special case of Lebanon.” But generally speaking, the media are taking care not to recall the paternity of this success, which contradicts their sheep-like and anti-Bushist analyses. Having been among those who supported the American strategy of 2003, I rejoice all the more in this success, even if everything isn’t yet perfect. For example, the plight of Christians in Iraqi remains appalling.

Year after Year, Iraqis provide a denial to those who believe that there exists an incompatibility between Islam and democracy – which is coupled with a yearning for freedom on the part of many Iranians. In recent days, televised reports showed that electoral posters of female Iraqi legislative candidates, depicted without veils (is Olivier Besancenot aware of his backwardness when he defends his veiled candidate?). For my part, I recall the peremptory assertions of those innumerable commentators who assured us that democracy couldn’t be imposed (despite the examples of Japan or Germany) and that resorting to force could only consolidate terrorism. The followers of “soft-power,” those new Munichites [appeasers] who have the upper hand in France, remain ready to temporize in the face of the new “Islamo-Fascism,” a designation of Bush and the neoconservatives. If the “anti-warriors” had been followed, there would be no democracy in Iraq.

Read the English version here and the French version here.

As published for the Washington Post on March 14, 2010:

As the seventh anniversary of the war in Iraq approaches, an odd dissonance has emerged: Washington is fighting over who should get credit for winning it — at a time when the country seems to have tuned out the conflict completely.

Iraq’s parliamentary elections last Sunday, which the White House hailed as “historic” and a “milestone,” and Newsweek’s recent cover, featuring President George W. Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln and a “Victory at Last?” headline, serve as the backdrop for the debate, though it started earlier. Last month, Vice President Biden declared that Iraq could be “one of the great achievements of this administration.” Pete Wehner, a former Bush White House official, took Biden and President Obama to task a couple of weeks ago for opposing Bush’s troop surge, which he called “one of the most impressive and important acts of political courage in our lifetime.” And the New York Times’s Tom Friedman is passing out kudos to Bush and Obama alike while saying it’s all up to the Iraqis now — everyone gets a trophy!

Yet, as Washington Post polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta pointed out to me, public interest in the war reached its low point this month, after peaking during Bush’s troop surge in 2007, when the war was consistently rated as the most important problem facing the country, according to monthly Gallup polls. As of this month, by contrast, only 2 percent of Americans considered Iraq the top challenge, with unemployment (31 percent), the economy (24 percent), and health care (20) percent) all dominating our collective consciousness instead.

So, is it time to declare victory and start putting Iraq behind us? Not quite, says Dominic Tierney, the author of “Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics.” In Iraq, victory won’t become evident with a surrender document, a key battle or a symbolic moment, like an election, but through a series of “incremental gains,” much like a war on poverty, said Tierney, a Swarthmore political scientist. “It would take years of Iraq as a stable ally in the Middle East before we can look back and say it was all worth it,” he said.

Today’s triumphalism could easily dissipate, Tierney fears, if U.S. casualties jump or violence rises as Iraq puts together a new government. But as the United States struggles with wars abroad and political gridlock at home, even temporary public indifference to Iraq may feel like a strange sort of victory.

– Carlos Lozada

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